Teaching: Sharing a Love of Learning
About Kathy Woodard
Kathy Woodard has a Masters in Teaching in Elementary Education, and a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from the University of Virginia. She holds an Elementary Grades NK-8 postgraduate professional license from the Commonwealth of Virginia. Her eight years of successful teaching experience are a testament to the versatility and range of her teaching abilities. She has taught Gifted and Talented Resource, as well as first grade, fourth grade, and sixth grade math and science. Kathy has always loved learning herself, and it is this passion that fuels her enthusiastic teaching. She draws upon rich experiences to make her teaching as relevant and meaningful to her students as possible.
She has a solid background in math and science; and enjoys visiting museums, reading about new research, and conducting experiments and investigations. She monitors stream health, identifying and counting freshwater invertebrates through the Save Our Streams program. She enjoys birdwatching, ecology, astronomy, solving problems through creative use of math, and gardening. While on the geological tour of Virginia during a summer graduate Geology Field School for Teachers Kathy was affectionately dubbed Quiz Show by her classmates because of her unceasing curiosity and questioning. She shares this love of math and science with her students and helps them connect it to real life through investigations based on AIMS principles and Problem Based Learning.
Kathy uses technology fluently in her life and in her classroom. She created this webpage and has taught her students to create their own. Teachable moments lead Kathy and her students to comb the classroom and school libraries, and the internet for information. To showcase the products of their learning Kathy's students use spreadsheets, word processing programs, and multimedia presentation tools.
Kathy also loves language arts. She recently entered a poem in her library's poetry contest, and looks forward to discussing novels with her book club each month. She has a strong background in word study, reading in the content areas, and guided reading from graduate and postgraduate UVA courses combined with classroom practice. Early in her career she was lucky to have two mentors who taught her how to use writers' workshop. Using this powerful authentic teaching strategy, Kathy has seen amazing progress and excitement for writing in her students. Kathy herself was bored by social studies as a child and could never teach something she does not find interesting, so she finds creative ways to use primary source documents, historical fiction, culture and language studies, integration of geography and geology, and internet penpals around the world. This way not only does Kathy find social studies interesting but so do her students, and they learn more this way.
Kathy's undergraduate degree in Studio Art and her experiences as an artist enrich her teaching. As a mathematician, scientist, writer, and artist she moves from one mode of thinking to another. She also noticed that although she was lucky to work well in the traditional mathematical and linguistic modes of thinking, many students think primarily in other modes. She found this described well in Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, and tries to incorporate many modes of thinking into her lessons to engage all of her students. Indeed she finds that success in a student's strong mode of thinking can be used to strengthen their work in a weak area. She explored this idea in her thesis, Effects of Art Expression on Self-concept of Low-Reading First Grade Students. Art, drama, music and movement are integrated into Kathy's teaching of everything from poetry to pollination to positive and negative numbers. Enjoy her website!